3. Why are Abortion and Pregnancy Standards Defined by How Men Typically Experience Reproduction?

Fetal personhood is only one dimension of how men's experiences of reproduction dominate our legal and ethical standards for pregnancy and abortion.

Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Lee Marks and John C. DePrez, Jr. via The Atlantic

What to say about abortion while a coup is being staged? Well, in pettiness, I have to say that if people recognized that what happens to women matters politically then we wouldn’t be here held hostage by power-hungry supremacists, forced to witness an unhinged frenzy dedicated to dismantling democracy and deepen every form of inequality possible. What this government is doing to the nation is just what has been done to the marginalized and oppressed, but at a scale that now affects previously unaffected people.

For decades now, like so many others, I have watched and written about the US anti-abortion movement and its central relationship to oppression. Trump’s presidencies — from SCOTUS appointments to the declaration of two sexes — leave very little question, for those who doubted it, that denying people the right to make decisions about their own bodies has never been anything other than about control and power.

In the chaos of the past few weeks, all I have been thinking of is that the right-wing’s successful strategy relies on mainstream tolerance for 1) the erasure of women from “serious matters,” 2) widespread ignorance about how people with uteruses and ovaries experience the world, and 3) disinterest in/unawareness of how universalizing men’s perspectives and experiences negatively affects us and our politics. Trump and his movement have leveraged all to great effect and abortion is the ultimate example of how.

Like lines at bathrooms and inadequate seatbelt standards, assuming that women, for political purposes, are small, weak, or defective men has consequences.

Have you ever seen old Victorian photos of children with their "invisible” mothers – women in the background shrouded in dark fabric, holding their offspring still? The first time I did, I was jolted by the recognition of something unsettlingly familiar: ultrasound images that show fetuses floating in what appears to be empty space, disconnected from the person whose body is actively building it out of itself. The women are hiding in plain sight, doing what is required of them, but we are supposed to pretend or to assume that they’re not there; we are well socialized to ignore them. Images like these are photo versions of how women, in pregnancy, are seen in our medical, ethical, and legal systems: as backdrops to fetal development; their lives, bodies, experiences rendered invisible.

The problem is more than erasure though.

What these technologies and systems of thought do is universalize and impose men’s perspectives on reproduction. They perpetuate men’s historic legal, medical, and social dominance by removing women from serious consideration. Specifically, for instance, what defines the terms of abortion debate is dominated by how men experience reproduction: through atomization, separation, and without direct physical, emotional, or cognitive disruption and transformation. That standard is why legislators get away with saying and doing what can only be described as catastrophically stupid things.*

First, the pretense of a fetus as a separate individual. Men contribute DNA and then experience reproduction at a safe physical distance however that is not how our reproduction works. Every stage of fetal development—from blastocyst to baby—is a biological condition of transformation that involves the entire pregnant body. Not “the woman’s body” but “the woman.” This is not like men’s binary “baby in/man out” experience, but a relational and complex process in which the fetus relies on the pregnant person's body, resources, and health, usually far beyond the moment of birth or independent viability. A gestating person is in a continual state of flux and co-creation during which time she is both herself and another, or in the case of multiples, several at once.

Viability, for instance, has historically been the standard for abortion rulemaking. It is a standard defined by establishing a technical point of disconnection from the process of gestation as the point at which women’s rights can be contested. As a standard it marks physical separation as the marker of individual existence and rights. This framework (the basis of our system of rights) ignores the ways in which women experience pregnancy as a state of duality and multiplicity, where personhood and autonomy are not easily divided into separate entities. By imposing viability as the threshold for overriding a woman’s autonomy, the law reflects a male-biased notion of individualism that erases the complex, relational realities of pregnancy.

This basic framework is also fundamentally ableist because by linking personhood and rights through a standard of physical separation, it values self-sufficiency over interdependence, disregarding those who exist in states of reliance. Many disabled people navigate life and fight for rights through networks of support, their autonomy constantly challenged by the assumption of separateness as normal. By treating viability—an arbitrary threshold of physical detachment—as the basis for abortion and rights, the law not only denies pregnant individuals equal protection, but also amplifies broader biases against people whose existences are inherently relational.

Second, the portrayal of women as incubators. Since it’s impossible to argue that a fetus is actually separate from the moment of conception, it is necessary to essentially say that it is, in effect, “separate-in-waiting,” meaning that wombs are like waystations. Historically, and for many people still, pregnancy is a situation in which a baby is a temporary tenant in someone else’s body or as anti-abortionists sometimes openly put it, “hosts” or “vessel.” Essentially women - considered until relatively recently to be property, as slaves and through coverture as wives and daughters - are thought of as being rented. The legacy and persistence of this idea is deeply rooted in laws that limit abortion and prioritize fetuses over the people carrying them. Gender stereotypes about women’s roles, duties, and essential nurturing characters mean make having babies a duty based on women exist produce babies rather than be free people who can exercise agency over their own bodies. The idea that women are containers is dehumanizing, facilitating, among other things, comparisons in legislatures, of women to domesticated and undomesticated animals, depending on their race and ethnicity.

Third, claiming legal personhood for fetuses. If 1) a fetus is “separate” or as needing to be separate as quickly as possible, and if 2) pregnancy is one person “housing” another, then it’s only a short hop to 3) that a fetus is a person and should have full legal status. The apotheosis of this thinking is laws that privilege fetal rights over the pregnant individuals. And that’s exactly where we are—tolerating and passing laws that treat a rapidly developing clump of cells like a full citizen while treating pregnant women as second or third-class citizens, inconvenient at best. The only way to assert and maintain this is to withhold information - as in banning books and sex ed and tech companies censoring abortion and reproductive health data - and to spread mis and disinformation.

All living things are not granted personhood by virtue of being alive. If "life" is what determined personhood tapeworms and guppies would be people. Even though your liver is very much alive and entirely made of human DNA, it doesn’t get to have a social security number and vote. Personhood is not a biological fact but an ethical, legal, and social status that societies confer. The idea of personhood for a fetus isn’t about personhood in this sense but rather the use of personhood to make the religious belief in a separate “soul” the law of the land.

Fourth, the codification of women as disposable, something that has and is happening with widespread public acceptance. Disposable women - dying in parking lots and at home in front of their families - is the logical endpoint of a system that pretends men - politically recognized as people who don’t gestate - represent us all.

I realize there are compassionate, dedicated doctors and health care providers who work hard and take massive risks to ensure that this is not the case, but the reason they have to work so hard and take such risks is that, like people who gestate others, they are forced to operate within the parameters of a system that institutionalized men’s reproductive experiences and needs.

In states with strict abortion bans, doctors are being forced to withhold medical treatment from women experiencing dangerous pregnancy complications. They fear prosecution for harming a "separate person" – even when delay threatens women’s lives and results in their death. Medical residents are fleeing states where abortion bans exist, leaving women at even greater future risk. Women face criminal charges for substance abuse, suicide, basic health care, and miscarriages, their bodies becoming crime scenes.

Maternal deaths always rise with abortion bans, and it will be years until we are able to accurately gauge increases, but already, women are dying preventable deaths and suffering irreparable harm. In 2018, prior to Dobbs, it was estimated that for every woman who died, 70 others came close. That was when it was illegal to withhold care. What does hand in hand with making women disposable is babies ending up in garbage cans and raped children being made to to travel to have abortions.

Last week, a New York doctor was indicted by a Louisiana state grand jury for providing abortion pills to a Louisiana resident, marking the first time criminal charges have been filed against someone for sending abortion pills to a person in an anti-abortion state.

Building public understanding of pregnancy and abortion around men’s centrality, experience, and demonstrably rank ignorance* particularly devastates marginalized communities. Black and Indigenous women, already living with poorer health outcomes and healthcare systems decimated by systemic racism, have always experienced higher rates of mortality, harm, surveillance and criminalization, and now even more so. Likewise, disabled people's need for support is now more easily used to limit their reproductive autonomy. Poorer women can't access care or travel for vital care and abortions…and now even more so. So, today, being a person who can bear children in anti-abortion state - even if you are just visiting or traveling for work - means being a person on probation.

It may be that a relatively small percentage of people earnestly think that a fetus’ “liberation” from it’s gestating parent matters more than that parent, but that’s all it takes to effect the violence we are seeing in a society in which most people don’t seem to understand pregnancy or consider women’s autonomy to be a political necessity. The collective shrug that abortion rights attacks have elicited over the past twenty years now also means the relatively frictionless exercise of a whole host of related controls:

• Medical surveillance. I recently heard a group of men, ethnically diverse, probably in their thirties, in a coffee shop. These were men who I am 100% sure hate rapists and think women should have the vote and the right to abortion. They were talking about how worried they are about the possibility of state surveillance. Like a tree falling in a forest, if it doesn't happen to men, does surveillance happen at all? What do men like these think is happening when the state forces women to undergo a procedure that takes pictures of the insides of our bodies? The truth is that the vast majority of men don't. I wanted to interrupt them with two words every woman who might find herself in an anti-abortion state needing an abortion will know: mandatory ultrasound. Today, 13 U.S. states mandate medically unnecessary ultrasounds before abortions, forcing women to undergo invasive procedures and view fetal images, some requiring that it be performed with an 8–10-inch transvaginal probe. Legally mandated ultrasounds fuse state oversight and reproductive coercion, turning medical labs into state-controlled checkpoints that photograph, monitor, and document women’s internal organs for the purposes of ideological scrutiny. Using "informed consent" as a justification is a casually cruel way to further humiliate women, 98.4% of whom proceed with planned abortions regardless of being forced to see fetal images.

• The criminalization of pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes. By treating fetuses as separate entities from the earliest possible moment, proponents of personhood can posit an artificial zero-sum conflict between a pregnant person and fetus, justifying state monitoring of women and making it possible for prosecutors to charge women for “endangering” behaviors during and even before pregnancy. For years, laws initially meant for other purposes – like chemical endangerment laws used against people who took children into meth labs – have been used at the state level to target mainly immigrant, Black, and poor women, often with substance abuse or mental health issues. Those years were a test of public complacency and compliance. And the public failed to care.

  While women face heightened restrictions, intense scrutiny, and potential criminal charges for behavior even deemed potentially dangerous to a developing fetus, men's contributions to documented fetal harm go largely unexamined. For years, researchers have explained that sperm quality has well-documented effects on miscarriage rates, fetal development, and birth outcomes, yet there’s virtually no legal or medical infrastructure to ensure that men bear any responsibility for reproductive risks they create. In the current environment, mandated sperm health screenings for men over 30, for instance, would be a commensurately “lifesaving” policy, but fish will climb trees before that happens.

• Healthcare denial. When doctors view pregnancy through this lens of separation, they hesitate to treat dangerous complications for fear of harming the "separate person" inside—even when delay threatens the pregnant person's life. The framework of separation becomes literally deadly. I don’t have the emotional wherewithal to detail this today. Besides, we all know what’s being done in our hospitals, health care facilities, communities, and courtrooms.

• Men’s Increasing control over women and reducing accountability, taken even further. Dobbs didn’t take rights away from women, but, in the zero-sum way of this entire system - gave rights to men as legislators, husbands, and potential fathers. Here is a good break down of interconnected policies being pursued today to give legal control via spousal/partner/father rights:

  • Ending no-fault divorce, forcing women to stay in marriages against their wills. (After no-fault divorce became legal, rates of intimate violence dropped, depending on the state, by between 10-30%. Women’s suicide rates went down 5-10%.)

  • Spousal notification and consent requirements for women seeing abortions

  • The desire to expand rapists already unbelievable existent parental rights.

  • Male partner and parental veto power over abortion decisions, including in cases of incest

  • Proposed laws giving men the right to sue to prevent abortions.

  • With scant exception, there is little pretense that men should be “personally responsible” in the ways women are being told they have to be. While pregnant women face outrageous bills for prenatal care, in almost every state men have no legal obligation to contribute until after birth and even then, support is hard to secure.

Surveillance and other forms of monitoring and approval aren’t just about cameras, data collection, and veto rights. These are all tools enforcing male supremacist ideological agendas through systematic government oversight. Behind each of the controls above is the belief, made even more corrosive through racism, that women need to be reminded of their true natures, or aren’t clear thinkers, or are morally suspect. In any case, people in need of societal and political oversight, which, given the demographics of our family, legislative, judicial, policing systems, means mainly male oversight.

There is no reproductive accountability for men because mainstream culture generally only recognizes - in the law, in media - biological interdependence when it can be exploited against pregnant people to maintain a system of men’s control. This is why women have more rights as corpses than as living people. (If you are notallmenning right now…)

Most people, primed by polls and media that do the same, conceptually silo “abortion” away from The More Important Things like The Economy, Jobs, Immigration, Education, etc. even though, access to safe and legal abortion is necessary for people who need them to consider any of these. Most seem to accept that the government literally penetrating women's bodies against their wills while failing to hold men even minimally accountable for their reproductive irresponsibility is just fine and not the oppressive and unconscionable violation that it is.

Sure, people argue that in a democratic society, the right to abortion is fair game for moral and legal debate, that people’s religious beliefs should be respected, that abortion should never be an absolute right. If that’s the case, though, then abortion should come at the bottom of a long list of other forms of bodily autonomy up for democratic debate.

The classic argument is The Violinist’s Dilemma, posited in 1971 by Judith Jarvis Thomson. Imagine your brother-in-law needs a kidney transplant and you're the only viable match. We do not debate and then vote on whether you have to donate your kidney to save his life. If suggested, the vast majority of people would balk because it’s an outrageous violation of autonomy. Your brother-in-law will absolutely die without your kidney. You even have two kidneys and so able to live a normal life with one. You will save a human life. No one can make you do this, certainly not the state. In fact, bodily autonomy is otherwise so sacrosanct that even if you die, the state can’t use your organs to save your brother-in-law’s life without your prior consent. Even a corpse's right to bodily autonomy overrides the need to sustain and save another life.

In anti-abortion states today, a woman has fewer rights to determine how her body is or what her body does than that corpse. State governments can force her to be pregnant, be photographed, be tracked, undergo nine months of jarring physical transformation, possibly incur dangerous complications, experience major surgery, risk her short- and long-term health, her financial stability, her physical safety at home, and maybe die.

The primary argument against this scenario is that there is a difference between allowing someone to die and intentionally taking a life. But this distinction can only be made by ignoring the facts of pregnancy as experience by the people who get pregnant. Choosing not to be pregnant isn’t "killing a baby” with intent, malice, or carelessness - it's refusing to use your body, possibly at great risk and with lifelong consequences - to create another being.

In fact, if anything, the Violinist Argument, like counter arguments, understates the issue. Whereas the violinist, or in my description, a brother-in-law, only needs to transfer an organ or blood - a limited event with limited consequences - being pregnant is a complete organ system transformation that results in permanent physical change, sometimes debilitating or even deadly. For many, many women it is a traumatic experience.

We have to accommodate the complexity, nuance, and entwinements of gestation of how we experience gestation and reject the binary framework that has nothing to do with how we experience gestation.

In all of this, equal protection, which is supposed to be a thing, falls by the wayside.

If the law and our society treats a fetus as a separate entity but refuses to acknowledge the personhood and autonomy of pregnant people, they engage in sex-based (by mandate) discrimination against people based purely on reproductive capacity. By treating women as incubators, legislators use objectification and stereotypes to deny rights to privacy, autonomy, freedom of movement. Abortion bans burden only one class of people - those who can get pregnant, while another class (those incapable of pregnancy) are free and unencumbered with the physical, economic, legal and social costs of reproduction. Day-to-day, the result is a wholesale retrenchment of white male supremacist values, beliefs, and outcomes. All of this denies us equal protection under the law, you know, the kind described by the 14^thAmendment. These protections now extend, however, to fetuses, the most significant shift in constitutional interpretation that overturning of Roe effected.

Before Dobbs, states couldn't override women's constitutional rights by declaring fetuses as persons, now they can and are and will. In Georgia, this means, for example, that fetuses will be included in population counts, a situation described spinelessly in media as “unchartered territory.”

The 14th Amendment, meant to guarantee equal protection under law, will probably be more effectively used instead to institutionalize a two-tiered system of rights based on reproductive capacity, with people who don’t get pregnant enjoying full citizenship and people who do not.

Don’t Despair, Do.

Pointing out anti-choice conservatives' hypocrisy is a waste of time because their political choices policies aren’t about life-building, science, truth, facts, or even consistency—they’re about control. The goal isn’t care, its power. Abortion bans can be dressed in in infinite ways, but they will never be about deeply held ethics; but deepening social hierarchies.

Every time someone says “prolife,” say, “Oh, you mean protecting the rights of current and theoretical future men, preferably white?” and go about the business of dismantling the structures that make this possible.

Advocates for bills and laws that expand abortion access, such as ensuring Roe v. Wade protections both state and federal levels. Give money to or volunteer with legal aid organizations that fight oppressive abortion laws. Vote in your local and state elections to ensure judges and officials support reproductive rights. Donate to and campaign for political candidates who prioritize reproductive rights.Set aside time to call, contact, and meet with elected officials to demand they defend abortion access.

Fund local abortion access. Donate to organizations that help people travel, pay for procedures, and cover other costs. If you can, be a clinic escort. Buy emergency contraception for others. Spread information about safe options like abortion pills and self-management.

Push back against narratives that rationalize anti-abortion arguments or that silo abortion off from economic and political issues. Speak openly about abortion as healthcare to destigmatize it. Correct lies about abortion procedures, fetal development, and risks. Support the people making films, writing books, and engaging in journalism that centers the real experiences or pregnancy and abortion instead of made-up ones.

Support – in schools, on school boards, in local elections- comprehensive, progressive sex that is evidence-based and consent-focused sex education in schools.

And, always, for your own good, heed the bunnies:

*“I’ve milked a few cows, spent most of my time walking behind lines of cows, so if you want some ideas on repro and the women’s health thing, I have some definite opinions.”

”There is no such exception as life of the mother, and as far as health of the mother, same thing. With modern technology and science, you can’t find one instance [of an abortion necessary to save a woman’s life.]”

“It is a shame that it [rape] happens, but there’s an opportunity for that [girl or] woman, no matter how young or old she is, to make a determination about what she’s going to do to help that life be a productive human being.”

”The baby is not part of the body of a woman. The umbilical cord and placenta do not directly connect to the woman. The baby floats inside the woman.”

“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” “In the emergency room they have what’s called rape kits where a woman can get cleaned out.”

“Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful. They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. They feel pleasure. Why is it so hard to think that they could feel pain?”

"Can this same procedure then be done in a pregnancy? Swallowing a camera and helping the doctor determine what the situation is?"